Samsung Home Theater Projector: SP-H710AE – Projector Review: Summary, Pros, Cons 2

SP-H710AE Projector: Pros

• Excellent overall image quality when viewing high quality movie content, especially off of HD resolution DVD players – extremely “film-like” performance
• Best “right out of the box” image quality value, of any projector I have reviewed to date, no tweaking needed
• Excellent shadow detail
• Excellent highlight detail (near whites)
• Manual – comprehensive, but could use more practical detail on what certain features and choices offer, (ie, DNIe, SMPTE vs HD vs EBU, etc.)
• Extremely natural flesh tones
• Vertical lens shift
• Three user savable settings
• Overall good placement flexibility
• Apparent high build quality, quality look and feel
• Two component video inputs
• Quiet in low power mode
• Overall excellent performance on image noise, jaggies, cadence type issues
• Supports full 1080/24, 60
• Styling

SP-H710AE Cons

• Lack of extra digital inputs (only one – a DVI), would like to see at least two HDMI or DVI
• Could be brighter
• Blacks in letter box areas are fairly bright, compared to similarly priced Darkchip3 DLP competitors
• Tends to reveal flaws in content, such as compressed HD source material from cable (or satellite), can detract slightly in terms of enjoyment compared to less “critical” competitors
• Changing the lamp, requires unmounting the projector (if ceiling mounting) true of most, but not all home theater projectors

Typical Capabilities of the Samsung SP-H710AE home theater projector

Click to enlarge. So close

• Warranty (2 years parts/labor)
• Remote control
• Audible noise levels at full power (a bit noisy, but quieter than many) – not bad, considering
• Overall brightness is just below average
• Menu system
• Price performance – the performance is great, the higher price (relative to other Darkchip2 DLP projectors), matches the higher performance.
• Ease of use

Click Image to Enlarge

Competition

In this competition section, please remember that I am mostly conjecturing about the differences and user preferences between the Samsung, and other projectors that I have NOT had in-house at the same time. I do have my BenQ PE-8720 for reference in my theater room (but cannot project both projector’s images simultaneously, like I can with other projectors in my testing room. I did, briefly have the Samsung and the Mitsubishi HC5000BL together, as noted elsewhere, and in some side-by-side comparisons in the image quality section.